Articles by Justin Williams

Early January and an iron-cold easterly has given way to the wet warmth of a south-westerly. The post-Christmas week’s heavy dump of snow is all gone save for the odd grey patch piled up in farm gateways, thawing rapidly and leaving a smudged reminder of the beauty of a real Kentish winter.

It has been nearly a month since the concordat. Cash-strapped and struggling to keep warm in a ramshackle cottage in Hastingleigh, the enormity of Imperial’s vision has passed me by. Beth — my wife — and I left Wye for the hills the previous August. Since then, we have been plagued by terrible family illness. It feels like our lives are only just back on the fairway.

Neither of us intends to look back. Read the rest of this entry »

The smoke has finally cleared after the battle of Wye Park but the fallout from Imperial’s shattered vision litters the field. It’s almost six months since Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz announced that the college was scrapping its plan to destroy a large part of Kent’s most beautiful environment and that it would not look for an alternative.

If anybody hasn’t yet noticed, Wye College is gone. Its departments are closed or moved to South Kensington, its professors redundant or relocated, its happy and noisy population of red-faced agriculture undergrads a distant memory. For the people of Wye, this is the real legacy of Project Alchemy: the wanton destruction of an ancient institution by a small group of academics and businessmen located in a steel and glass building 60 miles away.

But the Wye Park scandal has also hurt those most closely associated with it, too, and some of them very badly indeed. The time for recrimination is, we hope, past and we don’t take any pleasure in the effect this disaster has had on the careers of its promoters. Yet, just one year ago none of us — least of all David and me, back then still trying to find out how to be journalists again — could have forseen how things would turn out. Read the rest of this entry »

The battle for Wye represented a famous victory in the war for a proper, functioning democracy in our county. But although that battle was won, the wider war against the corruption of our democractic rights is being lost on virtually every front thanks to the corrosive influence of a quasi-official network of unelected people who are seeking to influence the planning process in Kent before those who pay for it – us, the huddled masses – have an inkling of what is going on. Imperial’s Project Alchemy is the perfect example of this — a monstrous scheme, worked up for 18 months in conditions of total secrecy with the active connivance of public officials and elected councillors.

Imperial got away with it for so long because of the connections that existed between one man – the ubiquitous David Brooks Wilson – and the people who run our county. They are connections that run deep and raise serious questions about who controls Kent, whose interests are being served by those we pay to provide the services on which the county depends and what can be done to restore the democratic checks and balances that are vital to prevent a total takeover by the corpocracy.

Read the rest of this entry »

When he and his officers suddenly did their incredible volte face in September and announced that Wye Park would not be included in the Local Development Framework, Ashford council leader Paul Clokie issued a statement saying that in signing the concordats, it had never been his intention to ‘work up’ proposals of such a scale. But KCC’s release of documents dating back to 2004 raises serious questions about what Cllr Clokie knew and when and we are forced to ask, again, ‘how on earth could he not know what was going on?’

First there is the original smoking gun — document number 65 in KCC’s list — a handwritten note by Mr Perfidy Pete Raine laying out what Imperial was demanding. At the top he clearly refers to Imperial’s desire to build in the AONB and to raise a £100 million endowment. At the bottom of the note — which is undated but is clearly from 2004 (you can read why here) — are the people that Raine wants to draw into his ’small team’ to work up Imperial’s plan. They are two underlings from his own department and David Hill, chief executive at Ashford, and Paul Clokie.

Read the rest of this entry »

We think Project Alchemy represents a failure of democracy and a scandal of governance of monumental proportions. Imperial may have been defeated, its grasping would-be property developers sent packing and its main proponent — the ominipresent David Brooks Wilson — now picking up his redundancy cheque from the college and casting around Whitehall for a job. But the conniving local officials who worked up Imperial’s monstrous plans in conditions of total secrecy for more than a year are still in place, their six-figure wages and final salary pensions — all paid for by you, the people whose lives their scheming would have ruined — secure.

If there is ever an inquiry into the behaviour of people like Pete Raine, Kent County Council’s director of environment and regeneration (pictured right in suitable attire), then it could do a lot worse than start with Item 65 in KCC’s latest release of documents. There may not be a single smoking gun when it comes to Wye Park but Item 65 is as near enough for jazz. It is a handwritten note by Mr Raine of a meeting involving himself, Sir Richard Sykes, Brooks Wilson, John McCready from Ernst & Young and Sandy Bruce-Lockhart and Alex King — then leader and deputy leader of KCC – plus Mike Pitt, then the chief executive at the county council. The document is undated but it is possible to deduce that it was scribbled long before the first concordat was signed in April 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

He has been excited, angry, offended and finally, when it was obvious Wye Park was a dead duck, outraged. But in private Cllr Ian Cooling was regarded as ‘on board’ with Project Alchemy and described as ‘enthusiastic’ by one of the Imperial plan’s leading proponents.

Cllr Cooling, who recently said that he is ‘moving on’ from questions about his allegiance during the brief life of Wye Park, features in the latest and largest release of documents from Kent County Council so far, made available to save-wye.org under the Freedom of Information Act. We will be publishing all 73 documents — consisting of emails, hand-written notes and letters — over the next few days. Amongst other revelations, the documents reveal:

• That all those involved in Project Alchemy — including Ashford leader Paul Clokie who two months ago protested that he did not know about the scale of Imperial’s housing plans — knew that the college was hoping to get permission to build homes on up to 400 acres and that it was seeking a £100 million endowment.
• That threatened with the total withdrawal of Imperial from Kent, officers at KCC were the original brains behind the Wye Park idea … not the college.
• That officers and leading councillors at KCC fell over themselves to express their boundless enthusiasm for Imperial’s plans.
• That plans for a road into Wye from the M20 and a new link to the A28 costing more than £30 million were worked up by Pete Raine’s strategic planning department at KCC in 2004, long before such a thing was demanded by Imperial. Read the rest of this entry »

Ashford Borough Council’s leader, Paul Clokie, has said that the credibility of the Wye concordats has been undermined because Imperial College’s plans — as revealed on save-wye.org — are far more extensive than has ever been discussed with councillors or officers. He is now demanding urgent discussions with the college because, he says, the concordats’ ‘worth and credibility’ have been seriously undermined.

In a sensational development, Cllr Clokie — who signed both concordats last year and was, until now, one of Imperial College’s leading cheerleaders — says that he wants to place on record ‘that it was never my intention in signing the concordats with Kent County Council and Imperial to support the working up of proposals on this scale, or of proposals which incorporate large scale residential enabling development on greenfield AONB land’. In an amazing attack on Imperial, he adds that he is ‘most concerned that the intention of the concordats has been widely misunderstood and misinterpreted’.

Read the rest of this entry »

After a year of arm-twisting and at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds, Imperial College’s attempt to distort the planning process by having its ‘vision’ incorporated into the core strategy of Ashford’s local development framework (LDF) has come to nothing.

Last night’s meeting of the LDF task group accepted a recommendation from the borough’s head of planning, Richard Alderton, that the publication of a map by save-wye.org showing Imperial’s true ambition in Wye — 4,000 houses across 250 acres of farmland — made it unwise to include a reference to the scheme in the core strategy. Accordingly, the Wye policy, which ran to a page and, as revealed on save-wye.org, had been substantially written by Imperial’s planning consultants GeraldEve, was removed.

Read the rest of this entry »

They’ve been bleating about consultation, community involvement and keeping us informed for months. But, as some of us have suspected all along, it’s claptrap designed to make us feel all warm and cosy towards Imperial College.

The truth, in case you hadn’t already picked it up from Borys’s ‘let me put this in words you can understand’ comment on January 9, or David Brooks Wilson’s harrumphing impatience with members of Wye Parish Council, is rather different. So what do those ‘nice’ people at Imperial really think of Wye? This:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ashford Borough and Kent County Councils were apparently happy to be parties to a document which threatened the closure of Wye College unless Imperial was granted planning permission for its science park project.

A secret document, written by Ernst & Young and originally intended for public release alongside the second concordat on December 8, never made it into the public domain. Entitled ‘Wye Concordat: Frequently Asked Questions’, the unfinished document was one of several kept on the secure website set up by the parties last year to circumvent freedom of information legislation. Written by Hugo Peel, the man appointed by E&Y to handle publicity in advance of the public announcement, it contains a series of rash promises by Imperial about Alchemy — renamed Wye Park — that we now know to be utterly bogus. Read the rest of this entry »

Ashford Borough Council is poised to kill Imperial College’s Wye Park ‘vision’ by either dramatically watering down reference to it in the core strategy of the local development framework or dumping it altogether. We understand that the series of revelations about the true extent of Imperial’s plans to raise money by developing 250 acres of housing has caused serious concern within the council where officers believe that continued courting of Imperial may get the authority into legal difficulties.

The council had planned to put the final draft of the core strategy to its LDF task group in October. But borough planning chief Richard Alderton has now brought this forward to September 11 after save-wye.org revealed that Imperial’s planning consultants, GeraldEve, had played a major role in drafting the policy for Wye, a story you can read here. We understand that the revelations surrounding GeraldEve and continued secret meetings between Kent County Council, Ashford and Imperial have raised concerns that the current draft policy on Wye could render the entire LDF legally unsound. Furthermore, Mr Alderton has received a large number of objections to the core strategy from Wye residents demanding that the village policy is removed.

Read the rest of this entry »

David Brooks Wilson was given the Colliers report in April. It won’t have made pleasant reading

Wye is one of the last places in South East England that you’d be likely to achieve success with a science or research park, something that the man in charge of Imperial’s project has known only too well since April, a leaked report has revealed. The study, which the college has tried to keep out of the public domain, warns that the commercial side of Imperial’s vision would be jeopardised by Ashford’s poorly skilled workforce and because the park would be sited 60 miles from Imperial’s main campus.

The paper — titled ‘UK science parks and the ingredients for success’ — was commissioned from Colliers CRE by David Brooks Wilson in February at a time when many connected with the project believed it would be a ‘cakewalk’ having secured the enthusiastic backing of Kent County Council and Ashford Borough Council. Since then, a string of confidential reports have cast doubt on the viability of the project while Imperial has made Wye its ‘Plan B’ as it attempts to woo BP to open its biofuels research institute at the South Kensington campus. Nevertheless, the Colliers report makes grim reading for anybody still under any illusion that Wye could be made to work as a commercial centre of cutting-edge research. The report itself has been buried by Imperial’s estates department so we have no reason to think that anybody on the college’s governing council or management board knows about the warnings it contains. It also makes very unpleasant reading for those responsible for the economic well-being of Ashford as a whole with its warning that the lack of a professional and technically skilled worforce in the borough will have a negative effect on any commercial research park at Wye.

Read the rest of this entry »

It is poised to give Imperial £250million for a global centre to research biofuels but, as far as we are know, BP is completely unaware that the college is aiming to fund its share of the venture and make space for it at South Kensington by destroying the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty around Wye. That’s why we are now encouraging our readers to print out and send the enclosed letter to the head of BP — Lord Browne — so that he is in no doubt about what his company will be indirectly associated with, if it awards its global biofuels centre to Imperial College.

As save-wye.org has reported extensively over the last six weeks, representatives from BP were given a presentation by Imperial on August 21 as part of its bid to host the centre. Originally, Imperial had made research into biofuels the centrepiece of its Wye Park vision. But when BP announced plans for a global institute to be hosted by a UK or US-based university, Wye was downgraded to become a bog-standard science park to make room for the new centre — to be called the Porter Institute — at South Kensington. As we revealed, the June 12 presentation to Imperial College’s management board was told that AONB land would be sold for housing development to provide Imperial with a £100million ‘endowment’ to be put towards the scheme in South Kensington. Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Alderton, Ashford’s head of planning, returns to his desk today after a three-week summer holiday in which the quagmire of Imperial College’s involvement in the drafting of the Local Development Framework must have seemed a million miles away. We hope Mr Alderton, pictured right, had a pleasant holiday and, in case he missed them, we’re happy to point him in the direction of the revelations about how Imperial College’s planning consultants wrote the core strategy here and his bizarre series of email exchanges with Imperial and masterplanners Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) here.

For those who haven’t read these messages, they offer an amazing insight into the lengths that Ashford council went to to let Imperial College influence a document which will set the planning framework for Wye for the next decade.
But it seems that this is not the end of the story as far as Imperial College’s involvement in the drafting of the core strategy is concerned. save-wye.org has obtained an eye-opening email from Nigel Buck, acting head of estates, to David Brooks Wilson, the man in charge of Wye Park. Mr Alderton had asked SOM for an update on the masterplan ‘in view of the long period of silence on this’ but an impatient Mr Buck, pictured right, jumps in and suggests that the architects do not respond. Read the rest of this entry »

There seems to be some confusion about the authenticity of the maps and extracts we have carried from the June 12 report to the Imperial Council management board (a story you can read here). On Wednesday night, at the monthly Wye Consultation Panel meeting with Imperial, the man in charge of the science park project, David Brooks Wilson, complained that the extracts we ran never made it into the presentation given to the board and that they were from ‘a draft which was one of 27′.

We didn’t publish the entire presentation because we felt it was unnecessary and the size of the file is enormous. The extracts, we thought, spoke for themselves. However we have now discovered that the entire document is freely available on the internet through a website in the US, www.talkingstatues.net, where it has been converted into an ordinary site which can be viewed much like this one. We have looked at this site and can verify that the document is indeed the final version shown to the board at the June meeting which also proved the basis of our reports. Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial is preparing to sell parts of its Wye Campus to cover the cost of its hugely expensive and disastrous attempt to build a science park and 4,000 houses in the village.

Documents seen by save-wye.org show that valuers called in by Imperial’s estates department have put a figure of close to £17 million on the main assets at the college, more than enough to cover the £6 million Imperial is believed to have spent buying Wye in the first place and and the £1 million it has spent so far on its Wye Park ‘vision’. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest save-wye.org Monthly is now available as a special edition. It contains all the revelations about Imperial College’s true intentions towards Wye that have appeared here over the last couple of weeks.

If you are able, please download it by clicking on the thumbnail to the right, print it out and give copies to people you know who do not have access to the online edition. It will also be available in the New Flying Horse and Wye News. We’re making efforts to distribute save-wye.org Monthly to a wider audience again, so it will be sent to the members of Imperial College’s governing council, its management board and property advisory committee, Ashford borough councillors and Kent county councillors.

Thank you to everybody for continuing to support this effort.

If you have an A3 printer, then another version is available here.

It could so easily be the plaintiff cry of a Nimby, concerned about the destruction of an area he holds dear: ‘The removal of this tree will have a severe impact on the appearance of the area … causing a major deterioration from a country landscape … into one of an urban nature.’

But in a twist that will raise eyebrows in the village which Imperial College plans to treble in size, these words were written by David Brooks Wilson — the man in charge of the Wye Park project, a scheme which would result in the felling of hundreds of trees to make way for 4,000 homes. Until now, Mr Brooks Wilson, pictured right, has kept his environmental concerns very much to himself. But Imperial’s property advisor came out of the closet to protest against an application to fell a cherry tree near his home just outside Milton Keynes. Janet Croston, of Woodley Headland, Peartree Bridge, wanted to remove the tree at the house which overlooks the Grand Union Canal and Woughton marina. Ms Croston’s cherry tree was one of many planted on the ’sought-after’ development — a 1980s estate on the edge of the once quiet 14th century village of Woughton on the Green, a half-timbered community which has been subsumed into the suburban sprawl of Milton Keynes. Read the rest of this entry »

He has warned councillors not to be seen to take sides in the increasingly bitter battle over Wye Park or face being excluded from future debate on the subject. But Ashford Borough Council’s head of planning, Richard Alderton, appears to be only too pleased to meet representatives from Imperial College and discuss the progress not only of the Local Development Framework but also to chivvy their architects along in producing their masterplan.

Mr Alderton — who is already at the centre of a storm of controversy after save-wye revealed his secret negotiations with Imperial’s planning consultants, Gerald Eve, (a story you can read here) — is likely to face further questions about the impartiality of his department following a further set of leaks to save-wye.org. The revelations will also add to the pressure on Ashford chief executive David Hill who continues to insist that Ashford retains control of the LDF and is acting in an impartial manner despite clear evidence that Gerald Eve supplied the wording for parts of the Wye section of the LDF’s core strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial calls it an ‘endowment’. KCC’s planning chief Pete Raine calls it ‘enabling development’. Whatever the semantics, there is no getting away from the fact that what Imperial is planning for Wye is the largest house building programme outside of Park Farm in Ashford and would quadruple the population of the village.

About 250 acres of housing — stretching from the existing boundary of the village across the fields as far as Silks Farm in the south to Amage Farm in the east — is envisaged. Somewhere in the middle of all this mass of homes, roads and green spaces, Imperial’s masterplanners, SOM, have managed to site the two or three research institute buildings — either side of the road near Withersdane Hall — which will take up 24,000 square metres of land and stand three storeys tall. Also indicated on the map are the red areas where private companies wanting to associate themselves with the ‘vision’ are expected to set up shop. The research institute would house 700 staff made up of 80 principal scientists, 400 researchers, 40 scientific technical staff and 180 admin staff. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody familiar with this saga has suspected it from the moment that Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz told us that we had to accept Imperial’s ‘vision’ or be responsible for the closure of the Wye campus. But reading hard proof that the Wye Park ‘vision’ is nothing more than a smash and grab on the AONB to release funds for Imperial’s coffers still leaves you open-mouthed at the audacity of these academics with bulldozers in their eyes.

There it is, on page 14 of the management board report, the motivation behind the use of public funds to run a coach and horses through national planning policy:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ashford council has defended itself following save-wye’s exclusive revelation that Imperial College’s planning consultants wrote sections of the core strategy on Wye in the Local Development Framework (a story you can read here).

On Friday we revealed how Hugh Bullock from Gerald Eve had given Ashford’s head of planning, Richard Alderton, a marked up copy of the Wye core strategy at a meeting in April. The copy contained amendments, some of which have been incorporated into the latest draft. But in a statement to save-wye, chief executive David Hill says that the council has maintained control of the core strategy at all times and is committed to consultation with all ’stakeholders’. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh ye of little faith, Paul Clokie. You didn’t believe us when we exclusively revealed that the Imperial College Wye Park ‘vision’ was as good as dead (a story which you can read here). You didn’t believe us when we told you that Sir Richard Sykes was now keen on pursuing another romance: namely with BP at his South Kensington campus (even though this story confirmed it). You told the Kentish Express that you thought we had put ‘two and two together and come up with 15′.

And Damian Green. What can we say? In an amazing comment that sounded like some kind of weird echo, you told Kent on Sunday that you thought we had ‘put five and five together and come up with 20′. Read the rest of this entry »

Representatives from Wye and Boughton Aluph and Eastwell Parish Councils and Wye Future Group will this morning have their first opportunity to influence the core strategy of the Local Development Framework and its specific mention of Imperial College’s now defunct ‘vision’ for its campus in the village when they meet Ashford council’s head of planning, Richard Alderton.

It seems a shame, therefore, to have to reveal that Imperial was secretly involved in drawing up the document, rewrote it on more than one occasion and that some of the amendments incorporated in the current draft are direct from the pen of the college’s planning consultants. Shockingly, save-wye.org can reveal that the final draft was settled between Imperial College and Ashford’s planners at least a month before any councillor was allowed to look at it. A series of highly-damaging leaks reveal the level of co-operation between Ashford’s civil servants and a developer looking to concrete over hundreds of acres of the South East’s most protected countryside. Read the rest of this entry »

The full extent of the game that Imperial is playing with the people of Kent as it quietly downgrades its Wye Park ‘vision’ in favour of a scheme involving BP at the college’s London headquarters is revealed today. Despite continued attempts to rubbish save-wye’s original revelation that the college is secretly negotiating to host BP’s £257 million Energy Biosciences Institute in London — which you can read here — by claiming that there is not a formal bid, save-wye.org has learned that negotiations with the energy giant are at an advanced stage.

Indeed, at the same time as pulling most of its contractors off the Wye Park project, Imperial is so keen to host the world’s first dedicated biofuels institute that is believed that it wants to site the institute at the heart of its South Kensington headquarters.

The latest developments will come as extremely bad news for the signatories to the original Wye Concordats, not least Cllr Paul Clokie, leader of Ashford Borough Council, who last week attempted to rubbish our original story by claiming that we had ‘put five and five together and come up with 30′. He also claimed to have spoken to Imperial about the story and reported that the college was ‘not bothered by it’. But given what we hear about a flurry of anxious phonecalls and meetings between representatives of the college and KCC and ABC officers concerned that vapid promises of 12,500 jobs were disappearing in a cloud of vegetable oil smoke, somebody is clearly very worried indeed.

Unfortunately for the blustering Cllr Clokie, Wye does not merit a single word in the negotiations between BP and the college, which has employed Foster and Partners — the firm of architects led by Lord Foster which designed such iconic constructions as 30 St Mary Axe (the London ‘gherkin’) and the Millau Viaduct in France — to design the Energy Biosciences Institute. Imperial has used Foster before — to design the Tanaka business school and the ‘impregnable’ administrative headquarters, the Faculty building, which is home to Sir Richard Sykes and Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz.

Read the rest of this entry »

They refused to comment on our story about the mire that the Wye Park project is in but Imperial College has at least tacitly confirmed it to Kent on Sunday. In an article in tomorrow’s paper, Imperial is asked to deny save-wye’s original article — Imperial prepares to scrap its Wye Park vision — and notably fails to do so.

But we are not, frankly, surprised. Because the story is 100 per cent true and we stand by it. Read the rest of this entry »

It has cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, blighted Wye and its surrounding area and led to a run down of the college’s operations in Kent, but Imperial’s plan for a research institute, science park and thousands of houses is virtually dead, save-wye.org can reveal. A combination of cost overruns, poor planning and the announcement by BP of a £275million biofuels research programme in conjunction with a major UK or US university has all but killed Imperial’s Wye Park vision. Work on the project — apart from the masterplanning by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill — has stopped.

The news will both delight and worry those in the village who fought the college’s plan to build the research centre, science park and thousands of homes on the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty but wanted to see the campus regenerated. The end of the Wye Park plan raises the possibility that Imperial will now attempt to break up its Wye campus and sell parcels off to developers.

Read the rest of this entry »

The environment group supposedly set up by Kent County Council’s strategic planning director Pete Raine to consider the impact of Imperial plans for Wye is a sham being orchestrated by the college.

Documents released by KCC under the Freedom of Information Act show the committee — officially known as the Wye Environmental Consultation Group (WECG) — is being run by Imperial after a suggestion by Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, the college’s deputy rector, to Mr Raine. The two letters also reveal that some of those who sit on the group were asked to join it by Mr Raine before Imperial College made public its plans with the second ‘concordat’ in December last year. The group is chaired by Mr Raine and boasts representatives from Imperial College, the Environment Agency, CPRE Kent and the Kent Wildlife Trust among its members. Also on the group is Diana Pound — the former member of Wye Future Group who is now representing WFG in planning matters. Mrs Pound worked with Mr Raine in the 1990s. Read the rest of this entry »

You would have thought, given the fiasco of the concordats and the threat of complaints to the local government ombudsman, that some of our most senior public servants would learn to shut up when it comes to their enthusiasm for Wye Park and all things Imperial.

You would have thought, perhaps, that senior officers at both Ashford and Kent County Council would refrain from talking enthusiastically about a scheme that would not only breach national planning law but which, we are told repeatedly ‘is only an idea, not a plan’. So it is with considerable surprise and dismay that we learn of a particular conversation between two officials of KCC at a recent visit by Yvette Cooper, housing minister, to Ashford. Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial College’s first tentative plans of its Wye Park proposal would virtually double the built-up area of the village even before a single acre is lost to speculative housing development.

The plans — put together by masterplanners Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and reproduced here — show the Wye Park scheme bringing buildings up to the foot of the North Downs at Coldharbour Farm and Little Olantigh Road. But although zones for housing are shown on the plans, the development is to service the research and commercial science parks and is not the speculative housing development Imperial insists it needs to finance its vision, raising the spectre of further hundreds of acres disappearing underneath housing estates towards Brook. Read the rest of this entry »

Putting aside all the hype about Imperial’s new and possibly hypothetical science of GM crop derived biofuels, let’s take a reality check on the economic interests behind its core operations.

By far the largest element of Imperial College’s research activity is provided by the Faculty of Medicine. The reality is that nearly 70 per cent of Imperial’s total income is generated from grants and contracts (currently approaching £100 million per annum). This includes almost 200-250 clinical trials within Imperial — and considerably more when taking into account the partner NHS Trusts. For example, research undertaken by Imperial’s Department of Immunology exploits the strong clinical links on its Northwick Park campus, building clinical and therapeutic programmes from a strong basic science platform. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes Imperial College is uncharacteristically shy about attracting publicity for its world class activities.

Five years ago it had to pay nearly £50,000 in fines and legal fees after potentially releasing a deadly virus, for which there is no known cure. In addition to the failure to take basic safety precautions when working with a hybrid form of the Hepatitis C virus (developed by the university), it took a brave lab rat whistleblower to report that the cabinets in which it was kept were not properly used, or ventilated and no safety equipment was available.
Read the rest of this entry »

The latest of our save-wye.org 7 printed editions is available now. Please download it and, if you are able to, print out a few copies and distribute them to your friends. We are constantly surprised at the number of people who do this. Once again, we’d like to extend an enormous thank you to everybody who helps keep save-wye.org going.

Download the latest edition here

Imperial College is planning a building or several buildings equivalent in size to a major supermarket distribution centre or 10 Kempe Centres to house its Wye research institute. The building — which would be one of the largest in Kent — would take up 32,000 square metres of space on a site about five hectares (12 acres) large.

Members of Wye Parish Council were told about the enormous building by David Brooks Wilson, Imperial’s special projects advisor, at its regular monthly meeting with the college last night. Mr Brooks Wilson said that the centre, which would initially house up to 150 scientists, would be followed by its commercial science park, which could be no more than 200 or 300 metres away. He refused to be discuss the potential enabling development of up to 4,000 houses save that any housing had ‘not been defined’ and would ‘be part of the research process’, a cryptic remark many of those present struggled to decipher. Read the rest of this entry »

We promised it some time ago and now we are pleased to tell you that our special monthly Imperial College edition has just been sent to all of the governing council, department heads and pro-rectors at the college.

We want them to be informed about what is going on in Wye as they prepare to make crucial decisions on the Wye Park plans in the months ahead. Some of the most important people don’t appear to have email addresses so we will be posting the edition to them.

It’s a big file, so you will need a broadband connection. You can download this monthly special here

Imperial College will not seek either government or European funding for its Wye Park ‘vision’ because it wants to retain complete control over the project if it goes ahead.

Sir Richard Sykes, Imperial’s rector, made the admission at the May 23 lunch held at County Hall, which was organised by KCC leader Paul Carter. The get-together replaced a lunch organised by the Lord Lieutenant, Alan Willett, which was cancelled after publicity on save-wye.org. Read the rest of this entry »

Who is in charge of the Wye Park project and could Imperial College organise its way out of a paper bag?

Forgive us for asking these questions but the staff of Imperial must be asking the same ones after being told in two separate memos that David Brooks Wilson, former estates director and now special advisor to the rector, Sir Richard Sykes, is suddenly in charge of special projects — including the Wye ‘vision’. Not only that, but in the first memo — dated May 24 and issued by college secretary Tony Mitcheson — staff were told that Mr Brooks Wilson was reporting ‘directly to the rector’. You can find the first story we wrote about this here Read the rest of this entry »

It was barely one month before Sir Richard Sykes brought him on board as Imperial College’s Director of Estates and he was just a few months into his job as the vice-chairman of planning committee of the South East Regional Assembly. But David Brooks Wilson — the new Wye Park supremo — was writing letters to ministers objecting to the Government’s plan to strip county councils of their role in the planning process … letters which now make very curious reading for anybody interested in the concordat saga. Read the rest of this entry »

The group set up by Kent County Council’s strategic planning director, Pete Raine, to look at the impact Imperial’s Wye Park would have on the environment is struggling to get off the ground before it has even met. Read the rest of this entry »

They thought they had it all stitched up. But for David Brooks Wilson and Imperial College with its ‘vision’ of thousands of new homes and a commercial science park in Wye, Ashford Borough Council’s submission to the South East Plan will not make pleasant reading. And with the deadline for submissions on the draft plan to the South East Regional Assembly on Friday next week, the council’s view could prove significant in the battle to stop the college’s already faltering effort.

Gone is the overt support for Imperial’s project expressed by the council’s leader Paul Clokie when he signed the concordat. In its place is a far more reserved and sober assessment of the inclusion of the Wye proposal in the plan. Indeed, Ashford’s view that some of the enthusiasm and support for Imperial’s ‘vision’ in the draft plan is ‘inappropriate’ could prove crucial when all the submissions are put together. One wonders what Cllr Clokie — Ashford’s representative on the assembly — will be thinking about all this (we would ask him, but he refuses to talk to save-wye.org). Read the rest of this entry »

Fighting Kent’s corner: Lord Bruce-Lockhart of the Weald

The first signatory to the original, secret concordat and the man behind the international non-food crops centre infamously hijacked by Imperial College is to take title Lord Bruce-Lockhart of the Weald.

Formerly plain old Sir Sandy, Lord Bruce-Lockhart has had the title conferred on him by the Lord Chancellor as one of the Government’s newly-appointed working peers. The Chairman of the Local Government Association and former leader of Kent County Council, Lord Bruce-Lockhart said ‘It is a great honour and nice to be associated with a part of Kent where I live and where the countryside and traditional villages are so wonderfully and uniquely Kentish. I will be fighting Kent’s corner in the Lords. Of course, to all my friends, colleagues and people in Kent, I hope I remain just Sandy.’

Alan Paterson, of the Wye Future Group, has sent us this piece of news about the organisation’s latest fund-raising activities:

Wye Future Group’s Sponsored Walk on Sunday was a huge success with over £2,250 raised so far. On one of this summer’s hottest days, some 50 walkers enjoyed the magnificent views from both the top of Wye Crown and the Devils Kneading Trough. The 5-mile route went along the ridge of the downs from the start and finish point at Wye Village Hall, returning on footpaths across the Imperial College estate. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest weekly digest is now available here. Please print out and distribute as you see fit… and you will also see it on the bar of the New Flying Horse and in Wye News.

You can download it here

It is OK for their leader to sign an agreement with a potential developer looking forward to delivering their ‘collective goal’ and it’s just fine, apparently, for him to attend secret meetings and lunches with them. But it seems it is not all right for any member of Ashford Borough Council’s planning committee to discuss or express a view on Imperial College’s plan to concrete over several hundred acres of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty at Wye. Read the rest of this entry »

How much has the Wye Park saga cost Imperial College so far? It’s a question that even that whizz with figures, David Brooks Wilson, may struggle to answer. But you can be sure that it has run into several hundred thousand pounds and has perhaps even broken the million mark. Firms like Ernst & Young, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Financial Dynamics, Gerald Eve, Waterman Group and Berwin Leighton Paisner don’t come cheap. Perhaps the spiralling cost of this farce is what prompted Sir Richard Sykes to remove his No. 2, Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, as project manager.

However high the sum, the question that is being asked at the very highest levels of Kent County Council and Ashford Borough Council is, apparently: ‘Has Imperial spent so much already that it cannot justify pulling out of Wye to its governing council when its planning application for thousands of homes on the AONB is inevitably kicked out by a planning inspector?’

Read the rest of this entry »

That questionnaire: Remember the farce of the questionnaire drawn up by Tamesis PR and posted on the wyecampusvision.org site? You know, the one that pre-supposed the village wanted to see some form of development and gave everybody about four minutes to respond before it was embarrassingly withdrawn? Well, a new one is about to come out, one that has been boiled down to just four questions and which asks such gems as ‘what makes Wye special to you?’ Er…

Timescale appears to be a problem again though, with residents being given until the end of June to reply.

Sebastian Hanley of Tamesis responds: ‘The date on the revised questionnaire was indicative. It was issued to members of the Wye Consultation Panel as a draft for comment as agreed at the previous meeting. The deadline date will be partly dependent on when the questionnaire is sent out to households in Wye, but we will provide a minimum of 21 days for response.’

England 1 Brooks Wilson Globetrotters 0: The workshop with architects SOM due to be held at Withersdane on June 20 has been postponed until June 26 because of the pesky World Cup. Sebastian Hanley of Tamesis PR explains: ‘Due to the World Cup game between England and Sweden, it has been rescheduled to the 26th June to ensure all invited members have the opportunity to attend.’ The date of the next consultation panel meeting with opera nut David Brooks Wilson — June 22 — has not changed.

Newts take root: The ecologists hired by Imperial to survey the great crested newt colonies on and around the college’s landholding continue to get very excited about one pond that borders the estate in Brook. A visit at the weekend found 77 newts in one small area. Given that England is home to 95 per cent of the world’s great crested newt population, that the South East is the nation’s newt central and that Wye has very significant populations, it seems even more likely that the amphibians are going to cost Imperial a great deal of money if a decision is taken to go ahead with the grand projet.

And they haven’t even got on to the water voles …

Further evidence of how Imperial College has ‘muscled in’ on plans for a non-food crop centre at Wye — backed by the United Nations — has emerged in documents released by Kent County Council. The series of proposals, records of meetings, emails and letters confirm that the proposal for the centre at Wye had little, if anything, to do with Sykes, Borysiewicz, Brooks Wilson et al and pre-dated any of the moves by Imperial to close the agricultural sciences division and turn Wye into the South East’s biggest building site. Read the rest of this entry »

Before you read this article, allow me to point out the usual Imperial/Ashford/KCC health warning about the Wye Park: there are no plans, no drawings, no models and no studies to help to inform you about the desirability or otherwise of the trop grand des grand projets. So what the hell, you may well ask, is this:

Read the rest of this entry »

They are words that have been used repeatedly by Imperial since the public announcement about the future of Wye College in December last year. Descriptions about the Wye Park project being of ‘national’, ‘international’ and ‘global’ significance keep cropping up in press releases and interviews with Sir Richard Sykes, the rector of Imperial, and his deputy, Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz. Read the rest of this entry »

Holidays and staff (!) absences mean that we won’t be producing save-wye.org 7 this week. It will return next weekend.

Wye’s county councillor will wait to see Imperial’s plans for its science park before he decides whether he will ‘go along with the village’.

At last night’s annual parish meeting, Charles Findlay faced several questions over his position on the proposal for the Wye Park and housing development on the college estate. At one point, parishioner Vinny McLean demanded: ‘When are our councillors going to get up to speed and start representing us?’ Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial is to remove five signs — including its 8ft white sign outside the main Wye College building — after admitting that it never sought permission to put them up.

The college says that the sign was put up to replace an existing one and that its planning consultant — Gerald Eve, which is also its main consultant on the Wye Park proposals — has written to Ashford Borough Council seeking guidance on whether planning permission is required. According to a statement released by Imperial, this is ‘normal practice’ to seek guidance before submitting a ‘potentially unnecessary planning application’ despite the building being Grade I listed and it being within a conservation area. ‘We recognise that, in this case, guidance should have been sought earlier and will be taking down this sign.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Wye Future Group is set to accuse all the main players in the Wye Park concordats fiasco of maladministration and acting ultra vires.

The group has dropped its claim for a judicial review in favour of preparing complaints to the Standards Board of England and the Local Government Ombudsman. The group is also reserving its right to pursue legal action against all the main players, too. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s issue of save-wye.org 7 — its seventh edition — is available for download now. Please download it and print it out and, if you are able to, distribute a few copies to those who do not have access to the online edition.

As ever, we are extremely grateful to the large number of people who are supporting this project.

Download this week’s edition here

For those enthusiastic about Imperial College’s plans to turn Wye into the non-food crops equivalent of Silicon Valley, it was to be the social event of the year. The names on the guest list read like the signatories to the mother of all concordats: Sir Richard Sykes, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, Paul Carter, Alex King, Paul Clokie, Damian Green, Ian Cooling and Charles Findlay. The token woman and voice of the environment was to be Dr Hilary Newport, the director of the Kent branch of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s 8ft tall and 3ft wide, made of shiny white plastic and helpfully directs visitors to Imperial College’s Wye campus to all points north, east, south and west. The new sign — which appeared early this week — also tells passers-by that they are at Imperial College London and is accompanied by a shiny notice about ‘accessible parking’. Perhaps more importantly, the sign has been put up without planning permission and could be a criminal offence under the Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas Act. Read the rest of this entry »

My colleague, David Hewson, has already said this, but forgive me for re-iterating it: we don’t believe in conspiracies round here but we have noticed some remarkable connections between the people who run our county and the people who have come up with or are openly backing the Wye Park proposal. And here’s another one, make of it what you will:

On May 23, the Lord Lieutenant of Kent — Alan Willett CMG — is hosting a lunch at his house in Chilham. We have no idea what fine vintages will be drunk, nor what Kentish Fayre will be consumed but we do know that the subject of the discussions will be Imperial’s ambitions and we do know who is on the guest list: Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s issue of save-wye.org 7 — its sixth edition — is available for download now. Please download it and print it out and, if you are able to, distribute a few copies to those who do not have access to the online edition.

Once again, we are extremely grateful to the large number of people who are supporting this project.

Download this week’s edition here

At the end of last week, we highlighted the appalling state of Coldharbour — one of the original farmsteads that make up the Wye College estate and once the home to the principal.

Since then, we have been sent evidence of the neglect of other buildings within the Wye College campus — from the oldest to the newest. Today, we print two pictures. The first is of the Latin School — one of the original buildings that make up the Grade I listed heart of the old Wye College. It is a 15th century building, built shortly after Cardinal Kempe founded the college itself. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s issue of save-wye.org 7 — its fifth edition — is available for download now. Please download it and print it out and, if you are able to, distribute a few copies to those who do not have access to the online edition.

Once again, we are extremely grateful to the large number of people who are supporting this project.

Download this week’s edition here

The thousands of homes planned by Imperial College to finance its Wye science park will not count as greenfield development because they will ’simply replace’ green field housing proposed for land south of Ashford, according to the former leader of Kent County Council.

Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, the chairman of the Local Government Association and one of the latest set of working peers to be nominated for the House of Lords, was the first signatory to the original, secret concordat signed with Imperial in April last year. He will take up his seat in the Lords later this month and says that he will use it to ‘fight hard’ for the science park to go ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial College wants to cut 20 staff out of its total estates workforce of 360 in an attempt to rein in the department’s £9million deficit.

The college’s director of estates, David Brooks Wilson, has written to all staff in his department — which has an annual budget of £28million and has a further £125million a year to spend on new buildings — asking for 20 voluntary redundancies. Mr Brooks Wilson, who recently took on two assistant directors of estates — Steve Howe from Tate Modern and Nick Roalfe from Marks and Spencer — has also asked staff to keep maintenance to a minimum… a policy which is already apparent to those concerned about the condition of Wye College where many buildings are in a poor state of repair and some have the appearance of being abandoned. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve had some tremendous success with save-wye.org: our online edition has a readership of 6,500 people and our print edition is five weeks old this weekend.

But there is one very important group of people that we worry are not getting to read the whole, unbiased and unspun story about Imperial’s faltering plans to build a science park and up to 4,000 houses in the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty: the staff, students and governing council of Imperial itself. Read the rest of this entry »

An academic at London University, who wishes to remain anonymous, argues that the noises made by Imperial indicate that the Wye Park will be bigger than anything in Europe

Imperial College has given no detail on its plans for Wye, merely the broadest of outlines. We have no idea what the new Research Centre might look like or how extensive the Science Park might be, but we can speculate from the little information available.

Professor Borysiewicz told Wye Village on 9 January that, to be viable, the Research Centre would have a minimum staff of 100 to 150 principal scientists and employ about 1,400 people. This is certainly large. Much larger than, for example, the Medical Research Council’s biggest laboratory – the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill – which has 60 tenured staff and a total staff of 750 on site, making Imperial’s vision twice the number of people. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest edition of our print version — save-wye.org 7 — is available now. You can download it here. Please print it out and give it to friends and neighbours who do not have access to the online edition.

We are very grateful to all of our supporters. Thank you, too, to those who are supporting this unique publishing effort with time and money.

They all deny it but evidence continues to mount that Ashford Borough and Kent County Council have entered into some form of private but firm commitment to support Imperial College’s plans to redevelop the Wye campus with a science park and housing.

The latest Freedom of Information disclosures to save-wye.org by Ashford council show that, before the storm of controversy fell on the project earlier this year, both the leader, Cllr Paul Clokie, and chief executive David Hill were enthusiastic supporters of Imperial’s plans. Read the rest of this entry »

The oblique reference to the expansion of Imperial College’s campus in Wye is to be dumped from the Local Development Framework and the concordats signed with Kent and Ashford councils last year are to be scrapped, save-wye.org has learned.

A senior source within county hall has told us that — in response to the threat of legal action by the Wye Future Group — the statement on the future of Imperial’s presence in Wye and the cryptic references to keeping the ‘world-class institution’ and ‘related research and business opportunities’ are to be deleted from the LDF core strategy options drawn up in the summer of last year. The source told us that Ashford council is ‘running scared’ and that Imperial College had ‘gone ballistic’ and had, at one point in recent discussions, threatened the two authorities with legal action. Read the rest of this entry »

The third issue of our print edition — save-wye.org 7 — is available for download now. If you can, please download this, print it out and distribute it to people who do not have access to the web edition.

We are very grateful to the many people who are helping us in this unique publishing venture.

Download save-wye.org 7 here

Our elected representatives and their officers deny its existence and insist that nobody has even sat down to sketch a line on a map. But without a single word of public debate, Kent County Council has given notice to the Government that it will want in excess of £5 million of public money to build a new road from the M20 at junction 10a to Imperial’s proposed science park.

A plan for the road — which both KCC and Ashford council continue to insist does not exist — is now county council policy and is scheduled to be built between 2011 and 2016. It was adopted as policy at a meeting of KCC last week without a word by councillors, including Wye’s representative, Charles Findlay. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mayor of Ashford has pulled out of the launch of the Wye Future Group to be held this Saturday because he had not been told what the purpose of the organisation is.

Cllr Malcolm Eke was asked to launch 84 balloons — each representing 10 of the 840 acres that Imperial College owns in Wye — at a recent meeting of the Ashford Independents at the King’s Head. save-wye.org has learned that he was not informed about the purpose of the WFG and was therefore unaware that it was the same organisation that is mounting a legal challenge against Ashford council’s signing of the ‘concordat’ with Imperial. Read the rest of this entry »

EXCLUSIVE

The Treasury has confirmed to save-wye.org that the £1 billion National Insititute for Energy Technologies — announced in last week’s Budget — will be sited on a university campus and that Imperial College is the front-runner.

In an exclusive briefing to save-wye.org, a senior official in the Treasury has confirmed what many people in Wye suspect: that Imperial College, with its proven expertise in fuel research, is likely to play a lead role in the Government’s urgent search for alternatives to fossil fuels and is the favourite to host the insititute when it is up and running in 2017. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Clokie, the leader of Ashford Borough Council, signed both ‘concordats’ with Imperial College without the benefit of any legal advice, save-wye.org has learned.

The revelation that Cllr Clokie did not seek or receive the advice of either the borough solicitor, Terry Mortimer, or other lawyers, before signing the first secret concordat on April last year or the second public document in December will send shockwaves through the council and raises the ante as Wye Future Group seeks a judicial review to get the agreements quashed. Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial College suggested that it would only build on the 60 acres of brownfield land it owns in Wye during secret negotiations with Ashford and Kent County Councils but saved its bombshell that it wanted up to 300 acres of housing until after the two so-called ‘Concordats’ had been signed.

Addressing a meeting of Ashford Borough Council, its leader Cllr Paul Clokie (Con), defended entering into secret negotiations with Imperial and said that he believed that the best way for residents of Wye to proceed was to ‘fully engage’ with Imperial as it draws up its plans to build a science park and what is now believed to be up to 300 acres of housing in the North Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Read the rest of this entry »

Gordon Brown today announced a £1 billion public/private partnership to build a ‘National Institute for Energy Technologies’ in his Budget.

Echoing the words of Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Imperial’s deputy rector, the Chancellor said that he believed the UK ‘has the capacity to be a world leader in energy technologies’. The announcement of the creation of the institute ties in with Imperial’s ambition to research biofuels and other sustainable energy sources at its proposed Wye Park. In November, Imperial launched its own ‘Energy Futures Lab’ to research technologies ’such as carbon capture, fossil fuel engineering, renewable energy resources and fuel cells’. Read the rest of this entry »

Wye Future Group’s press officer has quit the organisation in protest over the ‘covert’ construction of a new website.

Tatiana Cant resigned after claiming that she had not been told about the new site – www.wyefuturegroup.info. The website had been constructed by Chris Pound and Garth McCleod and was supposed to be a draft to be put to other members for approval. Save-wye.org understands that the group was forced to use the obscure .info domain after discovering that the domains wyefuturegroup.com, wyefuturegroup.co.uk and wyefuturegroup.org had been registered by Ms Cant’s partner, Kamal Sayanay, in his business’s name — Kantara — on February 11. Read the rest of this entry »

Wye Future Group should engage with Imperial College and not take on the role of a negative protest group, planning consultants have said.

Planning Aid, a state-funded organisation which aims to engage ordinary people in the planning process, has told WFG that it should not appear ‘too negative’ or take on an adversarial attitude when making representations on Imperial’s plan. WFG members have been told by its planning and environment committee – code-named ‘Green’ – that this would not be ’selling out’ and would not prejudice the group’s right to make representations if and when a planning application is submitted. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming soon: save-wye.org 7. Another way to read about the future of Wye

Since its launch in January, thousands of people have visited save-wye.org but we are keenly aware that not everybody wants or is able to read the news about Imperial College’s plans for its Wye Science Park on the internet. We also know that not every councillor on Ashford Borough Council or at Kent County Council is aware of the strength of feeling on this subject or the depth of the secret deals entered into in their name. Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial College will attempt to bypass Ashford Borough Council and get the Government to decide whether its Wye Science Park should get the go-ahead, documents released to save-wye.org indicate.

A summary of advice provided to Imperial by consultants Ernst & Young, released to save-wye.org under the Freedom of Information Act, suggests that the college may go straight to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister instead of relying on its two partners to the so-called ‘concordats’ — Kent County Council and Ashford council — to deliver. The document follows revelations by save-wye.org that KCC is on the point of pulling out of the concordats signed with Imperial and Ashford council last year and that several borough councillors are becoming increasingly nervous about the authority’s legal position. Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial College ‘ordered’ Kent County Council to remove two key documents from a series that it was about to release to save-wye.org under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents — one by the consultants, Ernst & Young, and a second 31-page document on how to deal with development in the local Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, written by the property consultants GeraldEve — were removed from the list of items to be released under the act to save-wye.org between February 27 and March 5. KCC has refused to offer an explanation for the removal of the documents — which were both drawn up for Imperial and shared with the county council and Ashford council. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bearman report into the future of Imperial College’s Wye campus has now been made available to the public. It was commissioned by the college in September 2005 and forms the basis of its plans for Wye.

Read it here: The Bearman Report

KENT County Council may pull out of the ‘Wye Concordat’ or scale back its commitment to Imperial College’s science park.

The sensational move would throw Imperial’s entire scheme into doubt and leave Ashford Borough Council as the only enthusiastic supporter of the plan. The county council’s legal department has told the Wye Future Group that the leader, Paul Carter, is shortly to hold a meeting to ‘further consider the concordat’ and may decide that the agreement can be ‘better expressed’. Read the rest of this entry »

A LETTER sent by the chief executive of Kent County Council to Imperial College more than a year ago suggests the existence of plans showing the size of and footprint of buildings being considered for Wye.
Read the rest of this entry »

There are two different versions of the ‘concordat’ to redevelop Wye.
JUSTIN WILLIAMS uncovers the one they never wanted you to see.

ITS EXISTENCE was unknown until a month ago. But the publication today of the first secret ‘concordat’ between Imperial College, Kent County Council and Ashford Borough Council — nearly 12 months after it was signed — suggests that the version signed in December last year may be little more than a sham designed for public consumption only. Read the rest of this entry »

IMPERIAL College has appointed one of Britain’s most successful firms of planning consultants to advise it on the Wye Science Park.

Gerald Eve, a London-based company of chartered surveyors and property consultants, will advise Imperial on the value of its landholding in Wye and, working with architects SOM, handle any planning applications for the campus. Read the rest of this entry »

IT IS one of the world’s leading firms of architects and is behind some of the biggest projects on the planet — from the replacement for the World Trade Center in New York to the masterplan for the regeneration of Canary Wharf in London. Read the rest of this entry »

A FULL outline of Imperial College’s ‘masterplan’ for Wye — including a possible planning application — will not be made public before July.

Addressing members of Wye Parish Council tonight (February 28) at a meeting to set up a liaison committee with the village, the college’s deputy rector, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, said that SOM — the architects working on the project — would be evaluating its feasibility between March and May. Only when they reported back to Imperial, he said, would the decision be made whether to submit a planning application.
Read the rest of this entry »

THE attempt by Wye Future Group to get the so-called Wye Concordat quashed by Ashford Borough Council has been rejected.

The rejection of the WFG’s pre-action protocol — a letter sent to Ashford Borough Council and Kent Council informing them that the group intends to seek a judicial review of the Concordat if it is not dropped — significantly increases the likelihood of costly legal action in the High Court over the agreement signed between Imperial College and the two councils last year.

Read the rest of this entry »

THE leader of Ashford Borough Council is unrepentent in the face of a storm of criticism over the authority’s support for Imperial College’s plans for a science park in Wye.

Despite the threat of legal action by the Wye Future Group in the High Court to quash the so-called Wye Concordat and the fury Ashford’s covert support for Imperial has provoked, Cllr Paul Clokie says that some of the concerns of residents of the village are “misplaced” or “premature”.

Read the rest of this entry »

ASHFORD Borough Council is pressing for a specific commitment to Imperial College’s plan for a Wye science park to be included in the economic strategy document for the whole of the South East.

The South East of England Development Agency (SEEDA), a government quango, has been inviting comments on its review of regional economic strategy which is due for adoption in the spring. When adopted, it will form the basis for decision-making on economic policy on a huge area outside London from Milton Keynes in the north to Margate in the east and Southampton in the west. Read the rest of this entry »

Wye’s borough councillor has described how both the leader and chief executive of Ashford council kept him in the dark over Imperial College’s controversial plans for the area.

Speaking at a meeting of Wye Parish Council on Thursday night, Cllr Ian Cooling insisted that he had no inkling of the plans being discussed by ICL, Ashford and Kent County Council until November 18 last year when he had been briefed by Ashford’s chief executive, David Hill, just three weeks before the project was made public. Cllr Cooling said that he had attempted to get the wording of the Wye Concordat changed when he saw a draft copy of it, but his efforts were rebuffed.
Read the rest of this entry »

IMPERIAL College instructed a major consulting firm to draw up a list of options for redeveloping Wye at least two years before it commissioned the Bearman report into the campus’s future, save-wye has learned.

Information released by Imperial College under the Freedom of Information Act shows that ICL instructed Ernst & Young as long ago as the summer of 2003 to advise it on the future of Wye.

Read the rest of this entry »

IMPERIAL College’s plans to set up a biofuels research centre and attract funding from the United Nations first received backing from Kent County Council last spring.

In June 2005, the then KCC leader, Sir Sandy Bruce Lockhart, met senior UN and World Bank officials in Washington in an attempt to secure funding for a global biofuels centre in Kent.

Read the rest of this entry »

More than 40 people — described as an ‘exceptionally talented bunch’ — have offered Wye Parish Council their professional expertise in the battle to stop Imperial College’s plan to create a science park in the village.

A meeting of the parish council last night heard that many others have come forward to offer their services to the group being set up to battle Imperial – to be provisionally called the Wye Future Group.

The list of experts who want to join the group include barristers, the finance director of a major building materials company, the chief executive of a neighbouring borough council, a judge, advertising executives, several journalists, a planning lawyer and television executives.

A borough councillor expressed disquiet that members had not been told in advance of Ashford council’s plan to sign an agreement on the future of Wye with Imperial College. Read the rest of this entry »